New App: Picnic Popular Destination For Teen Girls

As COO of Picnic, Emily Yuan wants to continue to build the future of communities’ growth online. She co-founded Picnic after dropping out of Stanford as a computer science major. While at Stanford, she was President of the Stanford Pre-Business Association, which was the largest undergraduate business student group, and published “Beyond a Bake Sale,” a book about social entrepreneurship. She previously founded Paper Bridges, an international non-profit with over 100 chapters supporting vulnerable children in the U.S. and around the world.

“I joined Picnic when I was 19, the summer before my junior year and then dropped out of school when I was 20, when I was a third of my way through my junior year. I did this because the momentum had grown and the growth was unbelievable and I just could not stay in school any longer, says, Yuan.

Nico Laqua started tinkering around with what became Picnic 3 years ago. At just 5 years old, Laqua was already using Internet forums, and soon after that, became an active member of many early forums ranging from programing to bitcoin to bug collecting. Seeing that there are no good places for communities to exist online, he began programming up solutions for his friends, one of which was Yuan.

Today, Yuan is 21 and her friend, CEO Nico Laqua is 23. As co-founders, they have initial funding of $2 million and have built out a world-class team, with engineers who had experience building scalable social products with hundreds of millions of users.

“Picnic’s goal is simple: to create the best place to create, scale, govern, and monetize any community. There is nowhere for young people to go for community anymore. Reddit, Facebook Groups, Quora, and Internet forums are all aging. Teen Girls doesn’t want to be on the same platform as their parents, we just want to make the Internet a more fun, exciting place” says, CEO Nico Laqua

In the past year and half, Picnic launched as an open beta version in March 2022. It immediately got super traction in just a couple months, and got a million users within a few months, which is among the fastest growth of any social media app. Then the backend broke because of the surging usage and Yuan and Laqua had to fix it on their laptops on a flight to New York City to meet with investors. After seeing Picnic’s usage, Google gave Picnic over $5M of cloud credits and additional resources to build and scale.

They built a scalable version of the app that can support up to a couple hundred million users, which was released in January 2023. In their mission to build the infrastructure for communities to exist online, the team is building in public and has open sourced its code.

From creating the first ever social AI store, to executing proven revenue share models pioneered by YouTube, Picnic’s world class team has not only the technical skills, but also a thorough understanding of the essence of Internet communities and their growth, to execute their mission of becoming the best destination for communities to exist.

“Our value doesn’t come from any given feature. Features are easy for any company to make and clone. Rather, Picnic’s value to users comes from the networking effects that come from hosting an ecosystem of communities. We create all our features with the end goal of providing a better space for communities to exist,” says, Yuan.

“By transforming the way that communities exist online, we are confident we can make the Internet a more vibrant, interesting, and meaningful place,” remarks, Laqua.

For more info: picnic.zone